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We had a power cut a few days ago which seems to have caused a few problems (Loss of data etc) and I restored my user folder from time machine.

You should never have to restore the user folder itself, only those folders and files under the user folder that were missing or damaged.

How far back does your Time Machine backups go and do you have a complete backup of everything? If you have full backups and can go back before you did the restore of the user folder, my suggestion would be to do a full restore. If some data is lost, you can use Time Machine to further restore just the lost data.

Part of the problem was that during the power cut it was mid way through a backup. The result was that upon powering up everything was lost on the mac itself apart from the applications. But all app settings and user data was reset to a "clean" install of Mac OSX Lion.

I opened time machine and restored my user folder but (Been a Mac noob) I restored it to the wrong place and this I think resulted in the position I am in now.

Or was in. I have resolved this the long and hard way by creating a second administration user on the Mac and copied all files across and deleted the original user.

In case of this happening again (I bought a UPS as well) is there any 1-click time machine solution that will restore all my settings, software registrations, bookmarks etc ?

I had to do this folder by folder the first time round and still got it horribly worng.

You did good. Creating a new user and copying everything over was next on my list to you. You were one step ahead.

As far as a one click backup goes, there really is none I would recommend. However what I do recommend is to use cloning software in conjunction with Time Machine. I keep several external hard drives for backup purposes; one for cloning, the other for Time Machine.

Will having a clone of the Mac drive allow (In a drastic situation) me to copy over the Mac install with the clone ?

In terms of external hard drive, what size will I need for this? My time machine backups go to a 2 TB external already, partitioned to two 1Tb. The 2nd partition is used ofr general files etc and the first is completely dedicated to Time Machine.

A 500 GB hard drive should be fine for cloning. And yes, the clone will allow you to completely restore to whatever state the system was is at the time the clone was made. I use cloning quite often in situations when major OS upgrades are to be made. It can save you a lot of headaches if an update to the OS goes wrong.